


and the breath of angels is nothing to your heartbeat under my hands

by Lexis_Cheshire



Series: after the aftermath (The End has passed) [2]
Category: Lunch Club, SMPLive, Video Blogging RPF
Genre: :D, Going Feral, purple prose babey, wayward worlds au, woo yea(shoves 7000 words of just descriptions)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:01:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24687316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lexis_Cheshire/pseuds/Lexis_Cheshire
Summary: six children fall down rabbit holes.six beings fall back up again.they are not the same.(and they never are, these fractured children, soul-deep wounds where home was ripped away.they never are.)EDIT 1/6/2021: cmc has been written out of this work. any works after this date will not include him. I do not support him or his actions.
Series: after the aftermath (The End has passed) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1784083
Comments: 6
Kudos: 27
Collections: Josh Allen's Home for Wayward Children





	and the breath of angels is nothing to your heartbeat under my hands

**Author's Note:**

> and the sky fades out, the fog burns down. the dark yields to sunrise and the tide calms, the clock ticking to nothing. the soil withers, and crumbles, and dies, and the dark of the ersatz mirror fractures erratic in its moorings—and shakes loose the dust from their minds.
> 
> sorry for the random overly obscure words, I got ahold of bunch that were so nice I couldn't not use them, so...yeah. enjoy!

and charlie speaks and his speech is like the susurrus of leaves, his eyes bright as neons with the chatter of rain on grass, rain on bricks, rain on wheat. the Sky whispers to him, beware, take care, violet banners and crowns of gold, rivulets of time pouring through his fingers as he ascends invisible stairs. visions interweave with the technicolor grass, pillars of moonlight sprouting from the trees, blue-marble roulettes spinning in crop circles, trenches colored pitch threading through the smothering grasp of the Goop. 

the cornfields rustle and he runs, runs, runs, fire climbing his lungs and flight-feet guided by wings stapled to his shoes with bark. forward, always, never looking back, he presses his fingers into soft soil and pulls vorpal-sharpness from stone as sugar cubes drop out of the knots of his hair. the hills smile at him from the horizon and he runs his fingers on the rim of the (traitorous, lying, beguiling) river and the ring of crystals meld with the overfast song dripping from the heavens. 

he breathes out and embers fly from his lips, cheeks aching with the rictus of joy, sweating out the effort of existing, hands like wings as he pedals his way into the jubilant Sky. emerald and baby's scream solidify under his hands, a hilt of sarcasm and salmon, pink spotlights glaring from flying pigs as he navigates the shifting maze of hedges and sphinxes. he shouts to the stretching blue, chimerical, knees buckling backward as he tears up eel-runged ladders, passing through the ghosts of monkeys.

fleets of unseen watchers hover behind his ear in tandem with the offbeat synth thumping through the walls. speech crawls out his throat, airy, melting to tar and feathers down his chin. his eyes flick to the left and words print themselves out on the screen, black and white and inescapable, absolute puppetry tugging at his limbs. the words scrawl out one by one and he follows their command.

take a step, it says, and he does. he takes a step and smiles at the camera, takes another and another and another before the Sky can ground him and the ground can swallow him whole and the whole of the Goop can break him to pieces. the stained-glass kaleidoscope of air shifts, breaks, reforms.

(wide-eyed heroisms are in short supply nowadays. it takes and it takes and one day the tax paid, will not be enough. one day it will take too much.)

-

the silence is deafening, shoving at him from all sides. what is this? what is this? what is this? he asks the watc-

where are they? why can't he see them? he feels their eyes on him. he knows they're there, why can he not see them anymore, their faces lit up by the light of his world? why can he not address them and tell them to stop, tell them to fix the horribly quiet land he's found himself in? where is he? where is he?! where is the Sky, where is the Goop, where is the mosaic of color and sound and crackling electric apples? where? where?! where?!?

charlie shakes and shakes and shakes apart, clawing at his hair, his face, the hollow of missing dimension raw in his breath. stretched against the seams of his body, unable to match the chaos of his mind to the sudden mute of the world, he rocks back on the shockwave of sonic stillness. 

and he can't stop, he can't, he can't he can't he can't he can't or else he'll stop forever, and if you stop the world will take you forever and always, melt you away in the searing soil, so he keeps going, so he keeps going, so he carries on and shoves back against the immeasurable gaping hole of loneliness. back on the open wound where rainbows once lived on his skin, where the fold of the wall behind which their silent watchers lived, where they told stories of adventure and danger and happiness and he got to live them out.

but the clouds do not divide ad infinitum and his screams come out solid, the ground stiff under his feet. he stuffs fistfuls of leaves into his pockets and traces the lines where text should have run, but the bricks are speechless and the sun does not beam at him and send down streams of gold to climb upon, and the evershifting Rules do not stick to the harsh lines of this false land with its washed-out background.

the sky is dark and the air is quiet and the earth is only green and brown, and it is so, so, silent, the lines of horizon rigid, single-toned green weeds drawing away from him as foreign night seeps across the unfamiliar face of yawning blue. there is nothing here he'd ever want, the epitome of opposite to his beloving home—they must know that, they should know that, surely, surely they wouldn't have sent him here—right? right? they wouldn't condemn him to the torture of this dull, dark world? he won't be stuck here, right?

what is this, he wails, and the response is lost in the colorless wind. 

he doesn't know what day it is, what day is it? nothing replies. 

please, he pleads, let me go back! and there is only silence. he jumps from the branches of the unliving trees and his legs are wrapped in pain instead of Goop. he turns desperate sight on the stitches of the fabric of dimensions, searching where he knew, he knew and—it should be here, why isn’t it here!—scrabbling at the empty space where writing should have been, computers out of his reach. 

he makes one last-ditch attempt, fingers twitching with grating lack of song. he stares up and at your face. i know you're there. i know you're reading this, reading me. i know you know how much this hurts, please—send me back, i know you can, please, please, don't do this to me! you know what this will do to me! 

(but of course, the spectators see this as entertainment. the reader has no power to save you, charlie. you have no allies here, none that can help you.) he receives no answer. what now?  don't worry. he'll forget we ever existed.

weights drag at his eyelids, wrestling him with a slowing peace he’s never felt (or so he remembers, time is only material in Babel after all), writhing in his panicked fight, hands digging against the invading heaviness that fills his head, his limbs, his mind. pitch snakes across his vision and even as his dreams leap into action he thrashes on the cold, still soil. Morpheus grips his dreams, covers the tumbling, leaping lights as Khaos' presence is torn away. when he wakes, he will not remember us.

he is the protagonist of his realm, savior of slime and sunshine. but, really—protagonists are just the version of the person who won in the end.

(this doesn't feel like winning.)

schlatt hears the jangling of coins wherever he goes, the rain-patter of gold and greed drowning out all other sound, all their lies and tricks and (false, surely false) kindness. imaginary wealth flares, spots of light refracting in his eyes, and he spins on suddenly shining streets and trips over his feet, illusory leather pouch heavy in his hand.

he slams into familiar pavement and gets up to strange sights, crowds of colorful people and eye-watering screens blaring in his face. where is he? towers of—glass, and light, and not and never gold—rising above him, air clear of smothering fog and the coiling, everpresent hunger writhing under his breastbone. he stands under the coruscant of labradorite butterflies and scintilla flying from the reflective spires that surround and yet do not cage him, airy and bright unlike the shadows cast by obsidian and fool’s metal.

a man of monochrome and six enigmas sweep him up and he finds new questions to ask. freedom was the rarest of gems, invaluable in its impossibility. he had wished, once—desperately, with great passion and fervor and purple-gold companion—to attain it, as all had desired in their unknowing yearning youth. (in business at the very least, he'd say, and leave it at that.) but it was a fools errand, he knew now. no one escaped the syrupy, soul-stealing menticide of the Fog. no one.

but.

charlie rolls his innumerable die and he sees red and black and spinning wheels, gilded velvet and crowned in breathless copper. the earth flickers, distorts, refracts back false images and eyes as dead as they are distant and twice as nonexistent. he asks him his name, speak his with impunity, knowledge spilling from his lips without consequence. how? 

the light flickers and shining towers stack up, jasper tokens sliding across granite. noah drifts into the room and he sees ravens' shadow swirl after him, travis offers carnelian satisfaction, hunger sated by rare gemstone slabs, garnets running down his chin. who are these, who would give everything and remain themselves? 

ted screams his person to the world and poker chips bearing his face clatter behind his feet. cooper twists on a heel and the barrel of russian's roulette revolves with him.  these beings hide not their faces and yet do not lose them, walk willingly into mist and the Fog does not visit them, bare their souls to the air and yet he cannot take them. why?

he runs rings around all he talks to, gifted clothes, truths, care without thought. he doesn't accept. what trick is this? he will not owe them for their impossible lies, their childish traps. he tucks food into his pockets and finds leaves in the lining, seaweed in his shoes, and no one shakes his hand. (no deal.) he flips quarters over his knuckles and gets heads every time, the scale of odds tipped in his favor. aflame with assurance he walks the halls betting everything on himself. he wins.

he offers cheap words to trade and gets bucketfuls back, sweeps ash off his knuckles and it doesn’t return. he calls them fae, for giving their all and yet losing nothing, and doesn’t notice the bite of silver on his tongue, the changeling child that he has become.

-

schlatt's voice is caustic, honied, designed to pick apart every flaw and sweeten his every deal. his eyes burnish aureate with the reflection of sky-scraping ladders and sifted silt smog. choking soot smears patterns into his skin, his clothes, his soul, artful poison seeping through his flesh as his smile betrays his sugarcoated promises. razor-teeth painted with pyrite, snake-oil salesman dressed in onyx and opal and ruby tie, shined sable steps clicking on concrete, marble, tear-stained obsidian. deceit lingers on his lips, bitter-bright embers burning out in his mouth, candied truth tumbling from his jaws gift-wrapped in holograms.

highfalutin suits bear umbrellas of tar, casting shadows in their wake, briefcases filled with bejeweled blood. ragged marketland stalls teem, populated with grey-wrapped figures and apoplectic, snapping haggling, rage and euphoria mingling from the flow of fortunes reversing, the loss of everything and the gain of anything one could ever desire. (and desire they did.)  jacks of the trade dress in black, betting their lives on red, ashfall and aurum trailing cupidity at their heels. steam puffs through their collars, fire licking silk hems, the forms of those who'd failed to follow through lining the curb in the hours before being swept away on a flood of flames. blood rushes through the boiling canals, carmine sewers shuttling cracked-skull betrayal out of sight.

and above the rutilant smoke reaches down to meet the people scrambling up, shedding cards and hearts and the innocence of stars alike. they reach their zenith stripped to their bones, bare of all personality, and become one with the magnet pull of Fog.

the faceless wander aimlessly, those who'd played the game in vain, squandered their chances and built faulty systems into their temples of derelictions. those are the jesters, the too-reckless, who'd gambled their very lives, foolishly traded their essence for—what? there is no greater horror, no price high enough, that would be worth or useful to the acid cleansing of theived mortal incarnation, the melting away of any and every identity, the breaking of their masks. their eternal minds stolen, eternal climbs broken, reduced to marionettes shambling through gasoline fumes. he clasps his own masquerade faces tighter to himself. no need to follow their desperate steps, led astray with blurring feet into the mist.

he twirls unidentifiable portraited green through his fingers, pyramids staring up, and grime collects under his nails. the roads are paved with citrine and bullion, high vaulted halls housing gleaming tables marred with the slam of lifebuoy discs. crescents indent the lifelines marking the insides of his lockpick's fists. hazy he dips into the heat-daze brass of his realm, breathes out glittering vapor from red-tipped sticks, picking through the minefields with the grace of angels and the deals of demons writ with the breath of those who signed their life away. he wins, and wins, and wins.

and he enters Plutus' domain with glee and palm extended to clasp their hand, prideful before his fall.

(he makes a deal he doesn't understand. his carefully-laid plans ruined, his mind, damned. and his friend, his friend, he turns to gold-rush sand.)

noah exhales and cannot suck air in again, ebony molasses invading his lungs, sticking the walls of his throat together. the emptiness is all-encompassing, all-consuming, and he screams, soundless, with unmoving lips, choking on Nothing at all. he is static in the void of everything, black holes where stars should have been, pulling his matter into thin, thin ribbons, unthreading the fabric of his person.

and it shoves and it breaks and it forces him back, and farther, and farther more into the vessel that was once his body until he cannot stretch even a single digit, no breath to give and no sound to make and no tears to fall. curled within the confines of his ribcage he sits and hears raven whispers drag at the ivory bars of his chest, dark tendrils poking at his huddled self, unfolding and refolding over his shoulders. the silence is absolute.

and the silence meets him, with sightless smile, and the silence greets him, with paralyzing hold, and the silence tears past his defenses and fills his mind with the roar of panic and invisible horrors and finally, unwelcome welcome blissful blankness, deadened tissue fading to white, to grey, to black. poisonous, insidious, it creeps over his thoughts and seeps into the folds of his brain, dampening them, muting them, extinguishing them. it hugs his heart in piercing grasp, coiling round his unresponsive hull, kiss his bones with hollow holes where mouths should have been-

slowly dissolving him away, assimilating the shell of him to them, sanding his edges down and dissembling his particles into the (heartless, loving, excruciating, numbing) unfathomableness of it all. it's terrifying and monstrous and comforting, a tranquilizer to his fever-sharp thoughts, and he'd do anything to get it to stop, and he'd do nothing if it didn't, and-

twin beasts twine over the ridges of his back, pinning him in place like a butterfly to a display case, wings made useless with formaldehyde and lacquer, blood replaced with burning ice, with anesthesia and molasses. naught but dread and machine's drone he drifts, unfeeling with automaton hands, unseeing through unopened eyes, unknowing with petrified mind. eigengrau settles over the hollows above his cheekbones, pulls his eyelashes from their moorings, and he sobs, soundless, unable to stare back at the rift.

(he knows this: that it stares back anyway.)

headlight-still in the silence of nonfunctioning life processes, his sigh is silent, expanding in the deep of space. the abyss yawns and reaches and snatches his exhaustion from him all the same, once more like his sorrow and panic and anger and everything he had once and everything he could possibly have after, stolen one by one by one. they are gentle as they rob him of his senses, of his self, of his soul.

he thinks it cares.

(that's the worst part.)

-

noah tries and tries to describe, running out of words, out of phrases, and they just. don’t. get. it. they'll never get it. cooper offers the press of the deep sea, charlie the embrace of the Goop, ted the stillness of the crypts, but it’s nothing, Nothing, not like that. nothing is everything in Nothing, and when he speaks its name Nothing comes out, nullified breath stalled in the box of his too-white teeth, words fizzing out on his tongue. his vocal chords atrophied, his joints sparking with unuse, he struggles to recall how to move. he looks out and light stabs into his mind.

the heat of the sun burns him, the chill of the moon freezes him, the walls too white the floor too bright—his eyes water like they never (had been able to), hurricane raging on beneath his face, screaming locked within the frozen husk of his form. he weathers it, wraps the hush of nightfall around his overwrought form, suffocates himself in the expanse of blinding stars. delirious, he suffers through his physical presence, calentural and hypothermic in turns, trying to remember how to breathe.

he’ll never go back, not to the nothingness, and he’ll burn if it means it'll make that true—but something was stolen from him all the same, a space scraped out that only emptiness could fill. the weight of the void crushing him into the shell of his body, the revulsion, the euphoria, and both, and neither, and anything, and everything.  he buries himself in the comfort of alcoves and hates it for feeling that little bit more whole. 

he follows the spiral processions of ants through the valleys of his half-stolen personality, an endless march to their inevitable ends. walking in their circles, he feels the same, aimless useless march through time, formless watcher to the outpouring of life the others possess, only ever able to spectate instead of doing the same. hiding in the hollow under his human shell, he pulls flesh over his head and tries to pretend he exists. he turns to sleep for solace, desperate for the twilight hush of relief, and yet he dreams of fever, pounding lights, carcasses of crows dancing in ones and sevens as inkblots eat his face away, unconsciousness flooded with nightmarish rainbows and the agonizingly fiery grasp of touch.

but the weightlessness confines of the dark under the bed, the stifling walls of the closet, is all and only that will soothe the agonizing ache of feeling, bring that soul-searing familiarity back, heavy on the damp of his neck. he sickens, shaking, falling back together under the calm of his skin as his stomach bubbles up out of his chest. gasping, he bears the shock stock-still, sweating, shivering, eyelids glued shut—its far too much, far, far too much, make it stop, turn it off, make it s t o p-

and he drops himself back over the edge into oblivion to feel that sickening peace just once more.  just once more.

he feels like he's dying. 

he feels all too alive.

the void takes and the void does not forgive, and something went missing when he was Gone. Tartarus cradles him in its arms again and smiles.

cooper walks and salt tang swirls in his wake, too-fast in the nonresistance of air. his ears bend and flutter, eyes unblinking until liquid pearls line up on the edges, hair soaked in too-domesticated water. the siren call of the oceans pulls at him and he cannot respond, lilting song snarling into knots, spitting out only human coughs. he sweeps his side for spears and comes up empty, lashes a fin he doesn't have, that he doesn't have, that he very much does not have and he needs to remember—

frustration curls up his arms. land is too tame, too fettered, locked in place—he sways, he waves, he flows and eddies with the weak current of wind and sprawls in the shallows until water pours over his sight. he waits for rippling light and the chill on his second eyelid—but it stings, it hurts, and he can't see through into the once-clear shores, vision blurred. the clean of high reefs and colorful waters is lost to him, tearing up crumpled above the place that was once his home.

and his skin shrivels in the sun, in the shade, fingers ridged like coral as he dries out under the shower spray. the lakes here are dead, the bathtub paltry reassurance for the peace of the siltsand floor and the collective beat of those who made their home there. he gags on the sterile nothingness poured from the filter and pitches facefirst into the shower, longing to feel like he belonged in oxygen, that the breeze on his skin didn't make his scal—his hairs, his hairs raise, he pretends the plastic whir of ventilation doesn't make him want to drive a fist into it's stupid, unnatural, buzzing—

well.

one thing at a time, and he dunks his head and chokes where he cannot breathe, not anymore, not anymore, he opens his eyes underwater and is hauled out before he can fill his lungs with home. he leans and waits for weight to catch him, clicks out sos and hears no response. he gains more bruises than he's had in moons and moons of time, clumsy, trying to function on alien ground—enemy territory, with the enemy the very substance he swims through. 

and, tides, who in all the oceans would have cared to hoist up on the rare abovewater outcroppings when there was so much to do, so much to ever take joy in, in navy and midnight chasms and bioluminescence? who was he to expect to ever have to suffer the unbalancing touch of even the smallest zephyrs, to learn to walk on the sandpaper earth when soft clay could meet his scales instead? who?

rage licks at the blunted remains of hunting tools, his most loyal weapons—rows of daggers docked in the bay of his mouth, a fleet, an armada ready for battle. the loss chafes more than the unfamiliar clothes do, rough where the living silk of the sea could never be. he mourns in the low rumble of a  whale’s ballad, of blood in the water and three rows of teeth, gone before they had a chance, at least it was quick. 

(but this isn't, agony on his every atom screaming for water and yet, he cannot survive in the liquid either, half-in-half-out—what would you rather be, unable to breathe, or unable to move? unable to see, or unable to think with the touch of the whistling dust-dry air whirling around him? no comfort, no contact, losing his mind unsubmerged in memory. and he laughs hysterical in narwhal's call, fingers scrabbling for nothing.)

nothing will ever measure again to the weight, the press of water and the assurance, that it was here and alive and he was not and ever alone, so loud in the surrounding symphony of the seas. landlocked and unmoored, he floats facedown in the bitter-sharp brightness of a dead tide's pool, right angles and floodlights and harsh and unyielding concrete. painted and so poisoned, featureless, clinical. he dumps fistfuls of pulverized gravel into the pathetic box of frozen blue. it does nothing.

(don't you know never to drink from stagnant waters? move with the tide. you will dash yourself to pieces on the rocks if you don't.)

-

cooper stitches his soul back together with seaweed and stinging rays, reveling in the swish of his gills, water filtering through his chest and up his throat with the constant and unspoken promise to always and forever remain. he kicks effortlessly through the rock-tunnels, fissures of fizzing bubbles and red-hot volcanoes, geysers spraying rainbow arcs into the dizzying open air.

barnacles cling to his back, silverfish and orange stripes twirling around and over his crescent-shining limbs, a liquid dance through filtered light with salt crystallizing on his lips. he has legs, then tail, then something in-between, the shift of webbing between his knuckles, skin flexing to fit those of his friends, glossy shields embedded in his flesh. strands of sand stretch from his head in anemone mimicry.

he laughs, exhilarated, shooting through the high-speed currents and forests of kelp, swaying with the slick bullets of otters tethered to the reeds. he streaks after multicolored octopi, pink and green and florescent yellow tentacles wrapping round his arm, white ink billowing from the mouthes of squids, chasing pufferfish to bump between dolphin's snouts. he whistles his happiness to the world and it pulses back at him, it's heartbeat washing over his hands.

he explores algae-mossed remains of ancient wrecks, piloted by no mortal and abandoned far too long ago, dressed in the ornaments of civilizations that had never been. the wood is foreign and familiar, slicked smooth as the drift-planks that he rides the waves with, half-carved with runes that ring almost familiar. sea-smooth glass and everlasting coral settle in the current, nets of unicorn-hair seaplants and sparking sponge catching at his spines.

and he goes down, down, down into the crevasses, spins laughing through whirlpools with shaped-shell protection, drives mother-of-pearl daggers into the armies of sunken statues, the waves of anchors cutting through cerulean peace. his heart calcifies in his chest as he watches the petrified remains of his brothers in arms fall, fall away and up and over into the glaring eye of the moon. rivers run down the curve of his cheek, the curve of the planets, hanging so far away in the void that stretches above the safety of storm.

they taste of home.

the primordial waves crash upon his head. Pontus rushes up, over, through him, and he welcomes it as it washes his past away.

ted is loud, louder, screaming his lungs out until his coughs come out red. he’s alive. he’s alive, he reassures himself, smiles wider, stands taller, clenches his fists until perfect nails bite identical crescents into his palms. he speaks like cracked static televisions, words croaking out mangled, unrecognizable, lips forming around dead languages and flesh-stealing arcana. his cries are the only things that sound right.

rubble haloes his head. the joint of his shoulder rolls, hands clasped around the ancient, day-old sword, a coffin of glassy air and unbroken chunks of cobbles. grave dirt spills from all sides and he wakes, colorless flat imitation of sun wavering in the sky. and he wakes, dirt sluicing off his face. and he wakes, dust feather-light on his hair. and he wakes. and he wakes. and he wakes.

desperation dyes him pale as morning snow, scattering pinpricks of light in his field of vision. he is ted nivison, ted of niveous skin and atramental, dripping hair, eyes of dormiveglia and pulverulence. half-consciousness, a room of frozen dust, and the ink slowly pouring on the floor. spreading, receding, spreading, receding, and stormfronts hover mid-bolt, hung in the air above him like ornaments. time winds back around his mind and sets all to order to fall again.

and it does, like clockwork.

it falls, and crumbles, and collapses, and repeats. and again, he picks up the blade. and again, he swings and hits and makes not a mark. and again, he falls, foundation cracked, like the castles, like the statues, like the monuments of this immortal, broken world. he falls, and there is no one to see him, and no one to catch him, and no one to care, angular faces grinning at him with all teeth and no kind light in the reflection of their rotting, clouded sockets.

all that stands, in the end, are tombs.

and, well. you know, sometimes, when the story's so long you forget the beginning parts and the middle parts and all the important little things in-between, all the little details begin to slip your mind. being human is an effort, and the denizens of this world gave that up a long, long time ago, in-between the mindlessness of existing. he runs through the revolving door of limbo until the push of his hands gives to the bite at his heels. he wishes for dizziness and gets only steel, always, cold against the stone of his hand, forever unworn, forever pristine.

and the only way you can't forget the end is to live it, over and over and over again—and civilization falls down around him as he kneels in the skeletal remains of himself, desperately trying to cry. help, he pleads, and prays for a god he cannot believe in, for days and days upon days and yet less than hours, time hovering in floating motes.

nothing responds.

-

the air caresses him, swirls around him, the exhale of this beautiful, bright world, and ted inhales until he can’t, until his chest shakes and his spine bends backward, every click of his joints reverberating against his eardrums.  monochrome corpses dance before his eyes and he wraps himself in the mannerisms of others like a shield, eyes glinting coin-bright with the promise of ferryman's passage stamped into the lids. air rattles in his ribcage and he gasps, deathly rattles of breath with every desperate claw for more, more, more.

he touches everything he can see, consumes all he can feel, flesh and blood and milk of mother’s, everything he can possibly reach. an overload of all his senses, burning meat, it’s so much, too much, hellish in an all-new way, and really, isn't it ironic that he wants it so, so bad and he can't even stand it?  every sound clatters in his skull and when he reaches out his hands are pale as bone, frosted blood unmoving in his veins. he folds his palms over his heart and feels nothing.

he's too raw and too sharp and oh, the words are nails on his eardrums, music like the shatter of glass, over and over and over-

he knocks a table and a vase falls, and a vase breaks, and he shoves his hands into the wreckage, and it stays broken, and-

he hits the wall hard, and the shock of it blasts through his hand, and it burns, and it's too much and it's not enough, please, no more, please, more-

and he-

and he needs it. 

he needs it, and lets himself pace and fight and shake against the lash of sight-sound-salt against his skin, pinpricks in his eyes as he spouts truth and lies and everything in-between. he listens to the ramblings of a not-madman—maybe the sane one, maybe the only sane one, maybe the only one who saw through the wall and spoke the tongues of puppeteers—he who knows the exact opposite and therefore is the mirror of him, the inverse, two reflections screaming each other so they might be enough. 

(please be enough, he begs the now-unerring flow of time. 

it's not.)

oh and it hurts, it hurts, it hurts so much but it's so easy, and oh does he need it, so, so badly, needs pins and needles and fire and molten sand slivers to drown out the dead air, the white underworld, the things that stole out of their human skins and rotting shells and stood up on their own unclothed skeletons and grinned at him with smiles of just and only teeth. he can’t stop. his sight swirls and he falls back on dead-pulsed rituals, stumbling over broken stones and living vines, tangling himself in the excruciating mass of humanity.

and he couldn't help it, can't help it, won't—laugher bubbling up his throat, bile crawling up his esophagus, the oil slick-spill of words pouring from his mouth. he can't help it, he can't, he can't, and he laughs and laughs and cries and laughs and breathes, breathes deep breaths like air is precious, like air is a commodity, like something could snatch the air from him, rip the very air from his lungs, the life from his breath.

Charon reaches and takes his toll.

(sometime, he thinks, one day, it would be nice to smile without the ache of unused ribs. sometime never comes.)

concrete streets and lamposts swim into his vision, forgotten structures rebuilding all at once before his eyes. the world snaps into sight.

and its.

not.

right.

when he speaks he can no longer hear the howl of brethren in his lament, the birdsong cadence lost to the wind. where did it go? why is it gone? his hearing is dulled, blunted, his sight the same—he cannot see the bark carved high near the nests, nor smell the flourishing flowers of home, of family, of safety. no serene frogs croaking beside crystal clear lakes, no fauns half-drunk on violet berries and the drum-rattle of bamboo and reeds.

he calls out and it's off, he screams and it's quiet, he sobs and it's not him, not at all, some invader that had stolen his voice. he yells, help, and his words catch on unfamiliar vowels, strangely-patterned speech, his own terror falling short of harsh-fluid language.  he sings, searching for friends, and it comes out twisted, mangled, sharp and broken, notes cut in half with the anticipation of other voices weaving through. he snarls and it's like his voice was cursed, to be robbed of all familiarity, reduced to soft tones and warbling tune, weak and weak and weak. 

he feels, human.

it feels wrong.

his nose burns with unnatural smell, painful faux-flower perfume choking out any proper markers of life or directions, any indication of allies. elongated, two-legged beasts sway over him, baring their teeth and yet not tensing for fight. he recognizes none of their speech, emitting coos, imitation words that fit clumsy and halting in their flat-toothed mouths. they open their jaws and horrendous sound burst from their lips, a mockery of real communication in sudden pauses and repetitive bark of noise. their bony, unfurred paws reach towards him.

in peace, or in threat? he cannot read their intentions, their scents disguised from him, and he lunges towards them, digging at their arms with—what did they do to him! what did they do! his, his pa—hands. hands? what's a 'hands'? his...hands...are fleshy, pale, lacking the sharp of claws that had always been there, his shields and swords and self. they scrabble ineffectively against their strange extra skin, and—and his fur! his fur!!! his mane is gone, his skin bare, with only a paltry cap of hair on top of his head. how? how, in all earthly means, how have they transplanted him into this alien body, these uncomfortable limbs? 

they wrap him in their false, rough pelts, bring him through a place that tastes of filth and death and acrid smoke. they give him a container with a poisonously colored liquid inside— this will make you feel better, they say, and when had he understood their flint-rock words, dull knives on the insides of his ears? he drinks and chokes on it.

oversweet happiness burns out on his tongue, synthetic syrup, fake, artificial, like everything in this cruel excuse of a world. sadness drips from the corners of his flattened, unfocused eyes. it is dreary and not, searing contrast in captured sunlight and distilled flower's dye splattered on the rigid grey monstrosities of blocky rock. 

there is no real grass here, straggling in the brokenness of ugly, stark stone, drooping dandelions sprouting from the cracked false turf.  where did he go? he doesn't know. 

he asks, take me back, please, and his voice is human.  they hear every word right and somehow, it's more awful than not knowing as they laugh and dismiss his pleads, give him unwanted and untruthful assurance that he's safe, that he's okay, that he's one of them. that he's one of them. but he's not, he's not. he's not. they say he is, insist in their garbled voices, but they're liars. they're liars. they must be.

they have to be.

(help me, he pleads, and it's the only thing they cannot understand.)

-

he sings sweet songs of sorrow and heart-yearning, wishing for the promise of butter-yellow flowers under his fingertips, fields of bluebells and iris and peace. 

wishing on the falling stars, he watches them tilt far beyond, and wakes in warmth and sunlight and softness under his hands. the forest unfolds before him and memories melt away like spiderwebs to candlelight, dew in the bright of morning, quietly dissipating under the force of brilliant happiness. 

because the truth is this:

travis longs for the lush of the woods, the glittering streams and dappled sunlight, vines reaching for him, calling him to stay, stay, stay. you belong here, says the jungle. don’t leave, says the jungle. this is your home, says the jungle. and he believes, and he stays, and he changes. 

his throat aches with foreign voices until it doesn’t, his eyes unfocus until they don’t, fingers smooth and useless until they aren’t. he wakes up one day to the flutter of wings ten trees away and the trills of birdsong ring in his ear. dirt makes it home under his nails and his teeth grow sharper with time, bared under pale moonlight and dyed in raspberry-flesh.  sap-stained smiles and his mucus membranes flex, shift in his mouth, throat-strings twisting into new form. all the better to speak to his friends with, yes? and soon enough, he has always had them.

and the world whispers that it loves you, and the world says everything you need is within you, and the world sighs lullabies into his ear, that everything is here, everything is well, everything will live with you and breathe with you and you will breathe with us. you will never feel sorrow again. this is heaven, this is sanctuary, this is the truth and this is the dream and you will never have to leave. and he nods and is lulled and curls into the soft mossbed.

it was not like this at first. but it was always this at the end, and that is that paradise is fruit and blood and midday sun and fullbright moon, and the promise of joy so pure that losing it would be a sin.

stay, the soil calls, and the earth will provide, the earth with give life and you will give yours in time, as all do. you shall not know the pain of death, the pain of loss, the pain of mourning.

we will lead you in the nests, the cocoons, the dens of the welcoming residents, the delicate blooms of peach trees. pear juice on your hands and the thrill of the chase, honeybees, nectar, and silver adrenaline, all at your fingertips.

all this we promise you. all yours if you stay. don't you want it? don't you want to be safe, be happy, be loved? to never worry of missing-pack, to run beside those you trust with your all and hunt as one? the soil calls, and the soil croons, and the soil folds itself over his legs and he says yes, yes, yes a hundred times over.

and slowly, slowly, he changes, and he doesn’t notice until it’s too late, but is it not bad? doesn’t he want it anyway? he sees the sharpness of each leaf, kinship in his voice, the sound of family rustling always just out of sight. and oh, he does, he wants to stay. the jungle pleads in honeycomb buzzing and he agrees. Gaia welcomes him hand-in-hand and leads him into the mesmerizing mushroom rings, once more, once more.

never, never trust, not among those who have nothing but themselves to love—lips pressed thin and pale as deep-sea fin, as poison mushrooms and morning snow and ice crystallizing hot around the waterline. watch each step, careful in each breath, sun in shuttered lungs and paper-thin skin over chapped fingertips. count to fourscore and still stand exactly where one was before, corners where the roads fold into doors and the requisite tricks to worm into them. follow the phone lines or be lost, fall down the holes where gravity and imaginary cross swords, and always, always pay the cost.

there’s veins stretching through the fog of air, copper-gold splinters of solid brick, smoky patches where traps ensnare. time snarls, catching, backtracked across the imprints of invisible animals and yarns of spiderwebbed soot tags that stretch across every just-wrong gate that passes. there is danger here, in the crook of bent nails, in the rushes under the dark sky—beware, for nothing, nothing here is fair.

the people stay ghostly within wreathed steeples, mindless, and brilliant, and knowing, and not. they are those who went astray, those touched with more than frost, denizens, citizens, versed in iron and storm and rot. litanies of empty greetings, read without a lick of meaning, that they are real and awake and fake and dreaming. a nightmare dared in each wish, pitch on loam and coal-tarred hair, crimescene eyes and moon-furred monsters in the weave of distant branches, hovels buried in cinder chips and mansions plated in platinum roses, cognitohazards and the smell of sugar—clear the mind, clear the wrath, clear it all, empty the very soul—don’t ever, ever step off the path.

there are only so many ways to play the game. take your chances in name, in fame, all that you can claim—or rid yourself of sight and walk blind, hang your hopes on prayer and the dizzying world’s edges where reality warps and rends, and test your gambler’s luck on where you’ll be sent.

(which way is out? which way is safe? which way will you step into a house, warm and clean and wraithed?)

rain, rain, go away, come again another day. (and it never rains.)

brain, brain, go away, come again and you will stay. (and you become your own bane.)

come again and lay slain, come and you will fall again and again and again, cracked to pieces, remade hollowed in fain and fortune unenviable in the gloss of coffin silk. 

and blood pools wine-dark rivers on fallow land, overgrown yet with bone-rich soulsand and ghastly arthropod, thrumming earth and sunken husks, quiet in the velvet mud. traveller, wanderer, figure in the mist, those who sought for a method to madness. those who won’t be missed.

eaves droop even over thieves stolen unseen, unheard, unburied, no blockade to the deserted streets and all on the barbed-wire walls of alleys. asphalt and concrete and stone, and that which roam and which never should be met, pickets and porches and gravestones fencing the sides of each copse of oaks. stood amongst the static trees are those who tried to flee, permanent residents in the woods

the air lingers endless with screams.

ink stains the dusk-dawn drudgery, forever cusped on the edge of downpour and the promise of skulduggery scraping each paved tile. patterns alight indistinguishable, carved among grifter’s shelterless symbols, alien and all-too-familiar in curlicue ribbons scrawling each endless mile. remembrance echoes over hedges of cotoneaster, chokecherry feast for the desperate and cruel-bodied creatures, church bells tolling over motionless preachers. there is no peace in the haze of cold-front vigilance, no angels come to save the sheep. find the lock. find the key.

it’s cold. and the world says to sleep.

-

laughter, delight, writhing convulsions, hilarity with each spoken word, and the thread of lies runs on unbroken. it’s red, and blue, and silvered sun, and running, and wasn’t this supposed to be fun? the children have guns, now, and sometimes shots ring out, and no one is hurt and everyone shouts, and the clink of metal is far, far too loud. there is no smog and no smoke and no fog and no mist, and there are no paths that end in death, there isn’t, isn’t, isn’t, is. monochrome automaton decoys populate the forever-marred forests, lifelike the way real kids almost are, chattering inane without a single scar. uncanny do they rest in the valley, in the alleyways, in the worming catacombs and the bomb-site finale. look upon it all, solid ground and distrust falls, ringing gongs true in false-god halls, mockingbird calls twittering underground, canaries forever singing loud. names and faces and places and fame, all in a day, all in the worldly masquerade, all, all, all consumed in flames.

color surrounds, sparrows fly and alight in leaps and bounds, wrong in the way it sits upon the ground. twitching leaves and shaking branches, arrhythmically joyful in the aftermath of disaster, misaligned in timepiece hands, insidiously fantastical in exhilarated dance. eyes glazing bright, with fever, with unholy light—the constellations that don’t fit quite right on the sky.

rapturous are the stars, deja-vu in alien landmarks, wounds that melt to nothing on sickly arms. empires that never were parade jubilee celebrations down each wavering avenue, whispers of superstition, of aeroplanes and curses and clouds of eggshell-blue, of mirrors buried shallow beneath the earth. offbeats serenades take up on tap-shoe drums, staircases of shortened rails and clumsy feet trying to run, people saying what they mean and something straight out of a dream, pick which is better, one is real, one unfettered. legends of winter and crop circles and conspiracy, of blazing shipwrecks sunk in deep seas, of being free, of being free, of being free.

escape or be made the same.

haywire goes the compass as the poles unfold, navigation of endless rolling nations and liminal hush in each train station. the borders of countries meld into grey, bridges spanned across hallucinogen lakes, wrought iron walkways and tollbeasts that watched it all march on in months and years and days.  afterimages of passed times that show up in the pastime, no rhyme or reason or sense of mind, outlandish, impossible, unreliably kind and that much more dangerous for it. horror crowds in with man-made mythos, atlantis landlocked amidst rings of odd-numbered crows perched upon pillared ivory, looking-glass fountains overflowed with hope-worn coins, all for naught but pale imitation of victory.

and, and, and, and, and so the story goes, deadly and shattered and unknown, unknown, unknown. wings and paper and burning flags, running a rebellion ragged, a fated clash turned council turned chaos, what was it meant to be? it was never meant to last, as it always has, lightning on the salted breeze. soft grass and nicotine cough, sweet sunlight and terror and moss, flight, and apple cores, standstill fight and loss for all standing on the curtain’s call. nowhere and everywhere and routine tilted on invisible axis, and the shine on the swing of axes, and all the things that go wrong in praxis—all the things that were made to be perfect. all the things the thing that were meant to be worth it. 

all the things that weren’t.

and stuttering honeysong echos, loops, repeats, falling from the throats of the defeated, who’d bargained and argued and bled and entreated and what had come of it? reality and it’s shadowed reflection, constant imperfection in its every dimension, the warp and weft of tangible tension layered in slices, that which tangles itself into its own image soaked in rum and vices. there lies war, and it’s counterparts, mockery of the tenets of art, the live demonstration of how existence falls apart. Hermes guides the vanished to the waters of Lethes, lost at sea to the harbors of mirrored paradise, anew in puzzle-piece peace so long as they pay the price.

they are the forgotten.

(they were human, once.  and then they weren’t.)

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed it! ^-^ I feel that I'm starting to repeat themes, so if you have suggestions or criticism please tell me!  
> also i am still planning on continuing red are the building blocks, don't worry! it's on the backburner for now, but i'm gonna complete the series!


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